Related papers: Optimally Dictatorial Committees
We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…
When can an interest group exploit polarization between political parties to its advantage? Building upon Battaglini and Patacchini (2018), we study a model where an interest group credibly promises payments to legislators conditional on…
I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…
Scoring protocols are a broad class of voting systems. Each is defined by a vector $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2,...,\alpha_m)$, $\alpha_1 \geq \alpha_2 \geq >... \geq \alpha_m$, of integers such that each voter contributes $\alpha_1$ points to…
A policymaker discloses public information to interacting agents who also acquire costly private information. More precise public information reduces the precision and cost of acquired private information. Considering this effect, what…
In centralized mechanisms and platforms, participants do not fully observe each others' type reports. Hence, if there is a deviation from the promised mechanism, participants may be unable to detect it. We formalize a notion of auditabilty…
We consider collective decision making when the society consists of groups endowed with voting weights. Each group chooses an internal rule that specifies the allocation of its weight to the alternatives as a function of its members'…
In many collective decision making situations, agents vote to choose an alternative that best represents the preferences of the group. Agents may manipulate the vote to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way that does not reflect their…
A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…
A principal delegates decisions to a biased agent. Payoffs depend on a state that the principal cannot observe. Initially, the agent does not observe the state, but he can acquire information about it at a cost. We characterize the…
The term "diffusion of responsibility'' refers to situations in which multiple agents share responsibility for an outcome, obscuring individual accountability. This paper examines this frequently undesirable phenomenon in the context of…
The responsibility gap is a set of outcomes of a collective decision-making mechanism in which no single agent is individually responsible. In general, when designing a decision-making process, it is desirable to minimise the gap. The paper…
We develop and apply epistemic tests to various decentralized governance methods as well as to study the impact of participation. These tests probe the ability to reach a correct outcome when there is one. We find that partial abstention is…
We develop new voting mechanisms for the case when voters and candidates are located in an arbitrary unknown metric space, and the goal is to choose a candidate minimizing social cost: the total distance from the voters to this candidate.…
Approval voting is widely used for making multi-winner voting decisions. The canonical rule (also called Approval Voting) used in the setting aims to maximize social welfare by selecting candidates with the highest number of approvals. We…
We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…
When selecting committees based on preferences of voters, a variety of different criteria can be considered. Two natural objectives are maximizing the utilitarian welfare (the sum of voters' utilities) and coverage (the number of…
We study voting rules with respect to how they allow or limit a majority from dominating minorities: whether a voting rule makes a majority powerful, and whether minorities can veto the candidates they do not prefer. For a given voting…
How to optimally persuade an agent who has a private type? When elicitation is feasible, this amounts to a fairly standard principal-agent-style mechanism design problem, where the persuader employs a mechanism to first elicit the agent's…
We introduce a general framework for exploring the problem of selecting a committee of representatives with the aim of studying a networked voting rule based on a decentralized large-scale platform, which can assure a strong accountability…